“And God said, ‘Love your enemy’,
Khalil Gibran
and I obeyed him and loved myself.”
If you’re reading this blog because the topic resonates with you, I feel very sorry for you. Not liking who you are can tear you apart over time and really make life difficult to live. I have also not liked myself for quite some time. And learning to love myself was the best thing that happened and that made my life a lot better. I’ll share everything I learned and really hope you can take some of my insights and use them to accept and love yourself more over time. Just know something – it won’t happen overnight. It’s a long process, but it will be totally worth putting in the effort!
Where self-hatred comes from
The first and most important thing to understand is the fact that not liking who we are isn’t natural. Primarily, we are souls. We’re mostly really old, have lived hundreds of lives and usually don’t have a body that we can dislike. And even though we understand that we are full of flaws and have a lot to learn, souls are fully capable to love others and themselves!
The fact that you don’t like who you are probably comes from outside. This means from critical parents, from bullies, from people we compare ourselves too, or are compared with, from people who have achieved more than we have, from people that look down on us and so on. Being bullied or criticized by parents from a young age or being judged for certain traits we have, creates emotional wounds early on. Sometimes, we get taught that we have to earn love by being a certain way or by doing certain things. This makes us be critical with ourselves because as children we learn from our environment. Probably, you have heard over and over (directly or indirectly) that you’re not good enough. But we can flip the script and teach ourselves the contrary!
Issues with appearance
Most people aren’t happy with their appearance nowadays, especially girls. And it’s not because we got ‘uglier’, which I think is a very subjective term anyway, but because beauty standards got so unrealistic to reach. We compare ourselves to people on the internet without understanding that usually, they too look like normal human beings.
As long as you take care of yourself, have good hygiene and appreciate your own traits and flaws, you can’t really be ugly. Everyone is pretty in their own way! Oftentimes, we have seen our parents (especially our mothers) be critical with their own body which then has imprinted on us too! Or sometimes it’s the people around you who, through their comments criticize your body and make you feel insecure about it. Go talk to them the next time they speak disrespectfully about your appearance. It will take constant reminders (that you can give yourself) that you in fact are really beautiful! You can do this through affirmations – talking to yourself about yourself in the mirror. It will feel awkward at first but with time, confidence will come.
Try to find and point out as many things about yourself that you do really like and highlight them. Tell yourself over and over how special and pretty those traits of yours are. With time you will believe yourself! For the things you don’t like, if it’s something that you can and want to change, work on changing them, but if you can’t, then force yourself to accept them. I say force, because again it will take time and you will have to convince yourself to like those traits. But it will come with time!
In general I would say have a basic hygiene routine that you can stick to. Shower, eat well, sleep more, take breaks, take care of your hair and skin, find colors and shapes of clothes that suit you, find jewelry or perfume that you’ll like on yourself and most importantly work on being kind to yourself! This is all it takes to ‘be pretty’. The rest is mindset.
Relying on outside validation
This is another thing that could really impact the way you see yourself. Maybe you have always been praised for good work. This seems like a positive thing, right? Yes, and it’s good that your family appreciates good work, but it will also make you feel really bad once you don’t achieve something. Being praised and admired for good work makes you dependent on it and if you suddenly fail at something you won’t have this feeling of being good enough. This validation can come from having good grades, hobbies, work, a clean room for example or from being liked by other people too. It goes for looks as well. If you have always received compliments for being so skinny, once you gain a few pounds, your confidence or self-worth will start to crumble. Which is a dangerous place to be in.
I recommend failing! Only if we fail and learn to get back up and try again, we develop this strength of not being reliant on being perfect at doing anything and instead trusting in our ability to learn. When practicing something often (and failing in between) and eventually becoming better at it, that’s when we get strong enough to be able to try again and not give up right away. It’s the ability of telling yourself that you can do something even if you don’t receive praise from outside. It’s the opposite of trying something, failing and telling yourself right away ‘I can’t do this, I’m not good enough’. This is namely the place where we start to talk down on ourselves and our confidence and self-worth start to crumble.
But understanding that failing is what it takes to becoming brilliant at doing something is the only way of trusting yourself to be able to do something even if doesn’t work right away.
Not liking your personality
This is another huge thing. Personally, when I started to work on myself, I also isolated myself (which is also not the healthiest) but I was able to then focus on becoming who I want to be. As an introvert I appreciate time alone. I found out that the more time I spend with myself the calmer I become. Now, as I live in a new city and my circle has become much smaller, I really like who I am – calm, confident, intelligent, friendly, etc.
But when I go home to the place I grew up in and surround myself with old energy, I realize that I get much more vulnerable. I feel the need to justify myself all the time. And I (inter)act differently with people I know from when my personality was different (a personality I like less). In this case, usually it’s your environment (include the people in it) who sometimes trigger something that will make you defensive (and therefore unkinder).
Here I would say, learn to not react to everything (something I still need to work on), to not take everything personal, to not having to argue to be right etc. Try to be true to who you are and who you are becoming. Value your peace over outside approval, validation, pride, ego, ‘being right’, etc.
The more you learn to love yourself, the calmer you’ll become, the less you’ll feel the need to interact with outside triggers. Surround yourself with people that are good for you, that accept you, that support your self-love journey and that bring positive energy into your life. You’ll see that then you won’t have to argue, to fight etc. in order to be understood.
Loving your inner child first
I can write an entire blog about this topic because I think it’s hugely important, which is why I’ll keep this chapter short. Probably, you already love your younger self. I know I do. The picture I have of my six- or seven-year-old self is adorable. She was really sweet and kind and pretty. And naturally, I feel the urge to protect her. I learnt in a meditation to imagine hugging your younger self and speak kindly to him or her, telling them you love them, that everything will be alright and that you won’t let people treat him or her badly ever again.
Now, you’ll become protective over your inner child and therefore over you (your current self too). I can explain it like this; whenever someone comments on my body and makes me feel like I’m too big, I imagine they say this to her. And it makes me mad because I can feel how she gets hurt. And because I love her, I want to protect her from this trigger which is why I actually speak up. Not because I feel hurt, but because she does. Once it makes sense to you, it will be a game changer.
Learning to be confident
Another crucial thing is confidence. Being confident means you trust yourself and you like who you are and you stand behind your actions and decisions. Confidence comes with experience. The better you become at doing something, the more confident you’ll feel about it.
You can be confident in doing something you’re good at. Usually that’s a hobby, something you learnt, like, do often and can do well. We naturally take leadership when we feel we’re good at doing something. In my case, I like to show people how to do different dances. It could be tutoring in a subject you’re good at, it could be teaching anything really to someone. Confidence can also be more general, an overall attitude and opinion you have about yourself. If you develop discipline and always do what you set your mind to – let’s say you get up at six every morning because you ‘said so’ – that’s when you start to trust yourself. It’s the way you see yourself, the way you walk, talk, dress, date etc.
Developing confidence will never be a disadvantage to you. It will send you more opportunities and make you like what you do. It will come with time, but you will start to like yourself more as well.
The final steps to self-love
You have to understand that loving yourself will take time! It’s a process that requires a lot of forgiveness, acceptance, understanding, comforting, reconsideration, etc.
Every day, you’ll have to look at yourself, find things you appreciate, work on certain things you dislike and accept others that you can’t change. You’ll have to find an environment and people that are good for you, whose company you like and who make you like who you are when you’re with them. At the same time, you have to set boundaries to things and people who aren’t good for you and who trigger your ‘bad’ parts.
Souls are not meant to dislike themselves. It’s our human parts that know this kind of criticism. We adapt this kind of negativity about ourselves from other people, our environment, and situations that we were exposed to since our childhood. A lot of thoughts are not our own but come from things we have heard ever since we’ve grown up. It’s possible to escape this cycle of being too hard on us and finally like and love who we really are. It’s easier when we are in tune with our spiritual side.
Hope, this was helpful, let me know your thoughts 🙂
See you next time,
Love, Valentina <3
